Three years ago my college roommates and I had a fabulous time at Marquette’s 35th reunion. From the first “hello” on Friday afternoon, the five of us burst into laughter and did not stop till we said “bye bye” and crawled back onto our respective planes Sunday night. We resolved not to wait until the next reunion to get together. But no one did anything to make that happen until Stephanie called one Sunday evening a few weeks ago. “I’ve had a couple glasses of wine,” she laughed, “so maybe this is a silly idea, but listen, we’re all turning sixty; let’s have a five-way birthday bash weekend in Milwaukee!” I said yes, then Diana said yes, then Mary Helen, then Linda. By the end of the night, we’d all agreed to spend the weekend of July 11-13 in Milwaukee celebrating our sixtieths.

I had no business spending the money or taking the time away from teaching and writing, but last Friday, I drove my car to the Tampa airport, took a plane to Chicago, a train to Milwaukee, and walked a half mile to the Hyatt. I did it because I wanted to know how sixty years of life had honed each of us. I wanted to hear my roommates’ stories and life discoveries. I couldn’t wait to hear their insights into the meaning and miracle of turning sixty. For my sixtieth birthday in June, I was blessed with a stunning croning ceremony, two joyous parties, a couple elegant dinner invitations, and several gifts that touch my soul. I wondered how my roommates had celebrated their important life passage.

Stephanie greeted us with a fat folder filled with places to go and things to do. I think we packed more Milwaukee into one weekend as visitors than we did in four years of residency. We stood outside as the wings of the Milwaukee art museum “flew” at noon. We walked around Marquette’s transformed campus. We knocked on the door of our old ratty apartment on Kilbourn. (Still old and ratty and still filled with fresh-faced Marquette students hauling cleaning supplies.) We ate sinfully rich pasta on Friday and had an orgy of Thai food on Saturday. We had vanilla custard at Leon’s. (For those in need of a quick Wisconsin lesson: custard is very soft, very rich, very yummy ice cream and Leon’s is the shop that inspired the hangout on Happy Days.) We sat in the sun sipping hand-crafted beers. (Hey, we were in Wisconsin for heaven’s sake!) We read about Brett Favre’s not-quite-retired retirement on the front page of the Milwaukee Journal. (Somehow the St Pete Times thinks this is worth two paragraphs buried in the sports section.) We drank wine and talked. A lot. In Stephanie and Linda’s room mostly—and in the nifty restaurant that rotates at the top of the Hyatt.

I thought I knew Milwaukee. I was wrong. The Milwaukee I knew from 1966 to 1970 had narrow streets hemmed in by red brick buildings with dirty windows. It had loud stinky busses. In my Milwaukee, there was no green grass. I remember as a new freshman wandering around the campus looking for a hillock of grass, giving up, and going back to my dorm to read. My Milwaukee was full of soot and cold and interminable snow. I didn’t expect snow in July, but I did expect darkness and dirt. I was wrong. The city is light and open and beautiful. The downtown trolley is adorable. Everyone breaks into kid-sized smiles as they step on board. The skyline is filled with graceful buildings that capture the soul of Milwaukee but with degrees of light and elegance that were a revelation to me. And the art museum on the lake? All I can say is Wow!

Milwaukee had clearly changed. What I wanted to know is: had we?

We were there ostensibly to celebrate our sixtieth birthdays, but when the subject came up, the conversation crumbled. I tried to talk about my croning ceremony, which I thought was terribly cool, but no one knew or wanted to know what a croning was. Instead of the delightful words I heard in my croning—queen, crown, wise, beautiful—words like old, sick, and mortality landed with thuds on the floor. We looked glumly at one another, and then Diana said that she’d heard that you grow at a steady pace and then—wham!—you jump from forty to sixty. We nodded. Yup. That’s sounded right. You go to sleep forty and wake sixty. (I like this idea. It explains why I feel forty, not sixty.)

At Sunday brunch, Linda asked, “Have we changed or are we just more of who we were in college?”

This is the most profound question that came up all weekend. Do people change? Or do we just become more of what we always were? If your personality is basically set by five, as many psychologists suggest, then do you—can you—grow and change? We know that as a species we evolve, but does an individual evolve? Or are you who your parents raised you to be? And if the answer is, “No, we don’t evolve,” then, I ask you, “What’s the point?”

Back at home, I slipped easily back into my monastic writer’s life, but Linda’s question kept pricking me. Had we changed? Had I? Or were the seeds of who I am today already sprouting at twenty? I thought I’d worked hard to release myself from my parent’s rigid beliefs and thinking patterns. But had I?

I got my answer on Tuesday teaching Writing Down Your Soul. I was sharing all the nifty science that explains why deep soul writing has such incredible power to change your life and I heard myself describing the relentless power of our old neural pathways, forged through painful or fearful experiences in childhood, to keep us stuck. As Andrew Newberg put it in Born to Believe, Free Press, 2006: “The brain is a stubborn organ. Once its primary set of beliefs has been established, the brain finds it difficult to integrate opposing ideas and beliefs.”

But you can, thank God, get unstuck. It just takes work, as Candace Pert, Molecules of Emotion explains: “…there is always a biochemical potential for change and growth….By learning to bring your awareness to past experiences and conditioning…you can release yourself from those blocks, this ‘stuckness.’”

I had struggled mightily to get unstuck. But looking back, I can see that that seed of wanting to break free was there even as I stepped onto the Marquette campus at 18. I did not tell anyone in my dorm how conservative my parents were. And when one poor boy from Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) cornered me in the stacks to say how wonderful my father was, I pulled him close, looked him in the eye, and ordered him in as scary a whisper as I could muster to never speak to me again. (He’s probably still telling the story of the lunatic in the library.) By the end of the year I stopped going to church. I was determined to become someone else.

So is Linda right? Are we who we were at twenty, just more so? Based on my ridiculously small, totally unscientific sample of five 60 year olds, I think so. The inquisitive are still inquisitive. The bold are still bold. The quiet are still quiet. The life of the party is still the life of the party. (Thank God!) The thoughtful are still thoughtful and those who had the answers then are certain they have the answers now. The patient are patient. The kind continue to be kind and the listeners still listen while the talkers still talk.

So where does that leave us? Do our old neural pathways have dominion from five to ninety-five? Can we evolve? Have you?

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Janet Conner teaches people how to connect directly to Spirit to receive the guidance they need to create the life they want. Her book Writing Down Your Soul: How to Activate and Listen to the Extraordinary Voice Within comes out this December from Conari Press. Learn more at Writing Down Your Soul Janet is also the creator of Spiritual Geography, the deep soul writing system that heals the broken heart. Spiritual Geography. Contact Janet at janetconner@tampabay.rr.com.© Copyright 2008 by Janet Conner